GRIFFIER, Jan I

Dutch painter, active in England. He was a pupil of the landscape painter Roelant Roghman. About 1666 he moved to London, where he derived more instruction from the Anglicised Dutch painter Jan Looten (1618-1681). Both these painters employed an earthy tonality and frequently painted on a large scale. Only one painting by Griffier, an immense and spectacular Noah’s Ark (ex-Nettlecombe Court, Somerset), illustrates these twin influences. Griffier’s other paintings of his middle years are quite at variance with this style: he executed numerous small Rhineland views in a highly finished and refined technique reminiscent in both colour and subject-matter of the mature style of Herman Saftleven.

Griffier was admitted to the Company of Painter-Stainers in London in 1677; he contributed a Landscape with Ruins to their hall. Griffier’s work as a draughtsman reflects his training by Roghman; he was an expert etcher and produced an impressive series of plates of birds after Francis Barlow (c. 1626-1704), as well as a number of good mezzotint portraits after such London portrait painters as Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller. Griffier seems to have been peripatetic (Horace Walpole suggested that he had his own yacht in which he travelled while sketching the scenery) and, to judge from his surviving views, was acquainted with many of the main British cities, including London, Windsor, Oxford and Gloucester. His English views provide valuable early evidence of British topography at a date when surprisingly little visual information survives. Their style is much broader and the brushwork more cursory than his Rhineland works.

Griffier visited Holland c. 1695 and remained there for about ten years before returning to London. His later years saw a widening of his subject-matter, to include occasional imaginary landscapes with grottoes and fantastic figures, a Turkey and other Fowl (London, Tate) and occasional marine views.

Jan Griffier’s son Robert Griffier (1688-c. 1750) and grandson Jan Griffier II (active 1738-1773) continued the family landscape tradition. Robert’s early work, where unsigned, is hard to distinguish from that of his father, by whom he was no doubt taught.